Well, have added more Pebeo dyes to this current piece and have turned a bit of a corner I think. I was coming to a natural pause with the hand stitch and needed something different. I love how the dyes can take you in a new direction. I stretched the linen on a board and wet it and then mixed some dyes. I always like the purply greys you can get with tertiary colours so went for that. It’s hard with the linen because it goes so dark when you wet it so you are working in the dark. That adds to the fun and makes you more inclined to take risks I think. I like the effect now that it is dry and am going back in with the hand stitch that is meditative and slow .Click  to  enlarge.

I do change the paintings on my wall at home, and recently swapped one near the window in our living room for this piece made in 2013 for a collaboration with Cambridge arts collective Artipeeps. Sadly, the group is no more but it is good to revisit those times by rehanging the painting I made on our wall. It interprets the story of Freya and the Brisingamen necklace that she had the dwarves underground in Vanaheim make for her. They said she could have the necklace for nothing, but she paid a high price for it. Freya was Odin’s consort, and when he found out what she had done he sent Loki the trickster shapeshifter to steal the necklace whilst Freya slept.

I really enjoyed interpreting this myth in my own way in oil paint then ink dipped in a crows feather. It seems to have so many parallels to our world today, as is often the case with Norse myth. I enjoyed drawing and discovering the history of the Vikings in my native Cumbria. Great Gable mountain was know as Odin’s mountain. I sketched motifs from the Gosforth cross with its mix of Christian and Norse iconography. A thoroughly enjoyable and mysterious collaboration.